How Quora became the hottest website of the year

This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Q: How did a knowledge database become the hottest
website of the year?
A: By having Dennis Crowley, Daniel Ek and Craig Newmark as its
contributors.

On January 20 this year, Google
announced that Larry Page would be replacing Eric Schmidt as CEO. It was the
week's big tech story, possibly one of the biggest of the year, and
it needed explanation. Within the hour, a user had put the question
to the information-sharing website Quora: "What are some possible
reasons that Google replaced Eric Schmidt with Larry Page as
CEO?"

Minutes later, a former Google employee posted a detailed answer
that included: "This has been a long time coming and not really
that big a leap to make if you've been on the inside... This is a
matter of pride and legacy for him [Page], so he's going to keep
Google's long-term interests in mind in a way that few outside CEOs
would be able to do; he's emotionally invested in a way that only
he and Sergey [Brin] can be."

Not all the responses were so boosterish. "If you want to be
competitive with Facebook," one
answer posited, "it is better for your organisation to be run by
someone who thinks like [Facebook's] Mark Zuckerberg instead of someone who thinks like Mark
Zuckerberg's uncle." A response from Venkatesh Rao, a tech insider,
suggested that in the past few years Google had succumbed to
"hubris" and an irrational over-faith in data crunching and
information organising. He wrote: "Google is like the geeky kid
who's far too logical for his/her own good. To succeed at social,
you have to be illogical, insane and delusional in clever
ways."

But Quora itself flies in the face of that assumption. The site
may be less than a year old, but it's already occupying rare mental
real estate at the front of Silicon Valley's consciousness. Compared with other
social-based startups that have succeeded because they understood
the infinite distractibility of crowds, Quora operates under a more
logical premise: people need answers to questions, intelligently
stated, from sources they can trust.

Jaws dropped in October when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stopped by Quora to say his company
spends between $500 million and $600 million a year on postage. It
was the third question he'd answered that week. On January 4, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams gave a
detailed answer to "What is the process involved in launching a
startup at SXSW?" Ten days later, Steve Case, former chairman and
CEO of AOL, gave an essay-length answer to "What factors led to the
bursting of the internet bubble in the late 90s?" That followed
several answers he'd given about the failure of his company,
including one written two weeks earlier where he stated: "As Edison
noted a century ago, vision without execution is hallucination.
That, sadly, is the AOL/ Time Warner merger in a nutshell."

With its formula of insider information swirling in an
intelligent, curated, elegantly designed environment that also
contains a strong social-networking component, Quora represents the
fever dream of the contemporary thinking person's web. If you want
to know what Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz thinks of The Social Network, just ask, and Moskovitz will
respond. If you want to know why Andreessen Horowitz invested in
Instagram, pose the question, and you'll get an answer from the
investor, and also the company's CEO, within days, if not hours. If
you want to know why Jonathan Abrams lost control of Friendster,
Abrams has plenty of time now to answer back on Quora. At times,
the site seems like the ultimate tech-industry water cooler, or the
world's most awesome conference call.

Others go further, talking about Quora as a culturally
transformative technology, which suggests its own question:
why?

The company's main office occupies about 110m2 on the second
storey of a block-length mission-style building in downtown Palo
Alto, California, though there are also unadorned meeting rooms on
an upper floor. It looks and smells like a hall of residence, or a
bachelor pad, or, at the very least, a lived-in university computer
lab: all industrial-grade carpet, bikes against the walls and cartons of marginally healthy
foodstuffs A box of baking soda on the window doesn't come close to
counteracting the olfactory effects of exposed gym shoes and
bedroom slippers. Decorations are minimal, brought in by the
company's 16 employees, almost all of whom are under 30 years old,
to put next to their computer workstations: stuffed pandas,
Uglydolls, the board game Risk and various sports banners. The
walls bear movie posters for Hackers ("Their crime is
curiosity") and Jet Li's Fearless, but most of the wall
space is taken up by flow charts, equations and to-do lists. It's a
room for a dedicated cadre of brilliant geeks carefully performing
no-nonsense, grind-it-out programming work. There's no table
football or other signs of frivolity. If Quora is an exemplar of
the latest Silicon Valley boom, then this boom is hardly being
typified by wretched excess.

By the window, an HD TV, wall-mounted on its side, shows currently active users,
a Twitter feed that mentions Quora,
and new questions: "What are the most interesting stealth startups
in Israel?" "What's the next big innovation in web interface
design?" "What are some ways to inspire girls to embrace
technology?" A poster-sized photo of Quorra, the smoking-hot
character played by Olivia Wilde in Tron: Legacy, sits off to the side of the water
cooler. It's been a busy month in Quora-land. No one has had the
time to hang it up yet.

Quora sprang from the minds of Adam D'Angelo and Charlie
Cheever, two young IT geniuses who met, like so many industry
up-and-comers, working at Facebook. D'Angelo started there out of
Caltech in 2006, and later was part of a team that hired Cheever
away from Amazon.
But they dreamt of making their own mark. D'Angelo says the company
started with "a high-level idea" that "there's all this knowledge
that's not on the internet and is either in people's heads, or
scattered and not very well organised. We definitely saw a gap.
We're trying to have a fresh start at looking at how we can get
information on to the internet. What's the ideal system for that?
How can we enable that?"